‘Transformation: Rhythm’s Roots’ Explores Black History

Transformation: Rhythm’s Roots Owen Brown Jr., left, and Jason Samuels Smith in a show about black history at Herbert Von King Park.

Andrea mohin / The New York Times

By BRIAN SEIBERT

June 24, 2014

“Transformation: Rhythm’s Roots,” a collaboration between the veteran jazz musician Owen Brown Jr. and the first-rate tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, advertises itself as a musical response to the recent Oscar-winning film “12 Years a Slave.” But its subject is actually much broader: the hundreds of years of African-American experience from enslavement to the present.

And on Friday night, when the City Parks Foundation presented “Transformation” in Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn, Mr. Smith did often seem like a man trying to find his way in a land not his own. Yet that effect did not always seem intentional. It was a casual-looking show, with Mr. Smith dancing in a T-shirt and shorts on an amplified platform, surrounded by Mr. Brown and a jazz trio. Though there was a set list, the 75-minute concert was very loose and appeared at times on the verge of falling apart.

Besides hints in the lyrics that Mr. Brown periodically sang, his score told its story of diaspora mostly by cycling through styles: rain-forest music, reggae, Latin, hoedown, blues, modern jazz and R&B. In addition to singing and scatting, he played fiddle, harmonica, keyboard and a variety of percussion.

Mr. Smith, improvising, responded to the changing music with passion and ferocious technique. In early sections, the expressive awkwardness of some of his steps — one foot crab-walking, as the other dragged behind it — did summon images of slavery, and when he rapidly hammered a toe tip behind him, it had the force of fierce resistance. But most of his responses were musical rather than visual, in the moment and in his own style, rather than history-minded.

The Latin section inspired some salsa moves, and the hoedown some airborne heel cracking, but Mr. Smith, grasping for ideas, did not always seem at home in these modes. His dancing was erratic and unsustained in general, brilliant and then blank and then brilliant again. This was true of the music, too, and it was unfortunate, or perhaps overly realistic, that in a show about transformation the transitions were clunky.

Much of the fault seemed to lie with Mr. Brown, whose wild-man antics got in the way of his bandleading. (The intonation of his vocals and violin playing was equally wild.) His playful interactions and trading of phrases with the more serious Mr. Smith felt like a mismatch. The greater rapport was between Mr. Smith and the excellent drummer, Butch Reed. Their exposed trades were exciting, echoing and answering each other not just rhythmically but tonally as well. Even better were subtler exchanges, like notes passed during class, thematically apt communication under the nose of authority.